The present disclosure relates to information retrieval.
Information retrieval systems, such as Internet search engines, help users by retrieving information, such as web pages, images, text documents and multimedia content, in response to search queries. A search engine locates and stores the location of documents in a searchable index used to facilitate fast information retrieval. The search engine may use a variety of statistical measures to determine the relevance of the resources in the index to the user's query to identify and provide search results.
Formulating a search query that accurately represents the user's information need can be challenging. For example, a user may be unfamiliar with search query constructs, keywords and/or syntax that may be useful in obtaining search results relevant to the user's information need. In such a case, the user may submit a search query that includes query terms that are general or ambiguous to yield relevant search results. That is, the search engine may identify a number of resources which match terms in the user's query, but which are unrelated to the actual information need of the user. In such a case, the user may have to enter a number of different queries concerning the same information request before reaching resources that are of interest to the user.